President Obama spoke yesterday to the Business Roundtable. Businesses could use a pep talk. Janet Yellen, President of the San Francisco Fed, speaks of a jobless recovery with no economic recovery until 2013.

The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger notes that:

…instead of giving a speech about reviving business confidence in the economy, Mr. Obama gave a speech about reviving business confidence in him.

The previous evening, Mr. Obama held a small dinner for some CEOs from really big business, such as AT&T, Xerox, State Farm, Verizon, PepsiCo, and GE. The White House has concluded that it is wrongly seen as antibusiness. Henninger says:

I agree. This White House is pro-business. In fact , it’s so pro-business it’s proposing a virtual merger with the private sector. Ladies and gentlemen of the business community, meet your new partner — Uncle Sam.

Answers, Mr. Henninger says, hark back to Obama’s first budget statement— “A New Era of Responsibility.”

“A New Era of Responsibility” describes the years before Mr. Obama as “an era of profound irresponsibility that engulfed both private and public institutions.” From this emerged the two core themes of the Obama presidency.

The first is that “government,” which Mr. Obama identifies as “we,” must “transform our economy for the 21st Century.” Thus, the now-familiar initiatives on carbon auctions, a green-jobs economy, and health care. “At this particular moment,” Mr. Obama said a year ago, “government must lead the way.” This isn’t just an antirecession patch, but something new and permanent. …

He is proposing that the U.S. government both guide the economy (“the right balance between the private and public sectors,” he said yesterday) and do so with a new, aggressively redistributive tax policy, which was made explicit in his just-released budget. Guide and redistribute.

Charles Krauthammer explained today that Obama “believes ideologically in this deeply. Obama sees himself as a world-historical figure, not just as the first African-American president, but, like Reagan, a man who changed history. He wants to be the father of national health care.”